No letup in FCC smut-free broadband fight

Ten days after the Federal Communications Commission released a favorable engineering report on the agency's proposed cost-free, smut-free national broadband service, the struggle over the idea shows no sign of cooling down. The FCC told Ars Technica this weekend that it won't yet comment on a proposal to exclude incumbent wireless providers from an auction of the 2155-2180 MHz band, where the service would operate. The agency is also mum for now on the big wireless carriers' charges that the conclusions of the study aren't valid.

On Friday, October 10, the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) released a long-awaited report on the testing it performed at a Boeing facility in Seattle, intended to determine whether the proposed service would interfere with mobile use in nearby bands. The summary concluded that the smutless network could run as the FCC originally proposed "without a significant risk of harmful interference."

The Commission, whose Chair Kevin Martin supports the plan, declared victory, calling the report "good news for everybody interested in bringing free broadband to those without access to the Internet." The FCC views it as validation of its intention to auction off this spectrum to a provider that will roll out a free broadband service to 95 percent of the U.S. population over ten years and offer the minimal standard of high-speed Internet (at least 768 kbps downstream). That provider would filter out any images or text that "constitute obscenity or pornography"—these are presumed to be harmful to teens or adolescents, defined as kids 5 through 17 years of age.

Block the blockers

But it looks like all that the OET study has done in the short run is to open the door for more controversy. On Tuesday, M2Z networks, widely considered the competitor most likely to buy the band in the yet-to-be scheduled Advanced Wireless Services 3 (AWS-3) auction, filed comments with the FCC that warned against "predatory bidding designed to thwart competition" in the sale. Specifically, M2Z wants the agency to block wireless incumbents from the auction.

"This prohibition is necessary in order to prevent these carriers from engaging in predatory bidding, as they did in the AWS-1 and 700 MHz proceedings, to preclude new competition," M2Z's Uzoma Onyeije wrote to the FCC on October 21. M2Z backs this assertion with statements made by Google and an economic position paper dating from August that charged that the AWS-1 auction, completed in 2006, suffered from "concerted blocking bidding by incumbents to exclude new entrants, notably Wireless DBS." That sale sold off a big swath of spectrum for 3G wireless services; a good chunk of it was bought by T-Mobile, which is now leading the charge on potential AWS-3 interference claims.

In its filing, M2Z points to Canada's recent AWS-1 auction, which set aside various blocks for new entrants only. "Conducting a new entrant auction, as Canada did earlier this year, would promote new entry and encourage auction results that differ significantly from the 700 MHz auction, in which two nationwide incumbents [Verizon and AT&T] acquired the lion's share of the available spectrum," M2Z wrote.

Ten dissents

Meanwhile, the incumbents haven't even started making arguments about the auction yet. The day before M2Z's filing, ten of them sent a joint statement to the FCC that challenged the OET's engineering report. "When generally accepted engineering practices are utilized," they wrote, "it is clear that AWS-3 operations under the Commission's proposed technical limits will cause significant and frequent harmful interference to millions of American consumers."

The comment was filed by engineers from AT&T, Comcast, CTIA - The Wireless Association, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel, Qualcomm, U.S. Cellular, and T-Mobile. That last wireless provider had led the pack in demanding testing to determine whether transmissions in the AWS-3 area would cause interference in the nearby AWS-1 zone.

The filing charges that the OET AWS-1/AWS-3 interference report missed the boat in various ways. Among them: the OET measured AWS-1 reception using what the filers say was the wrong receive signal strength; the tests used a greater separation distance than normal (two meters rather than one) to measure interference between AWS-1 and AWS-3 devices; and the study measured the attenuation (drop off) of potential interference incorrectly.

"With quality of mobile wireless service to so many consumers at risk," the statement concludes, "the Commission should not move forward with the proposed rules and instead should develop technical rules for the AWS-3 band that protect AWS-1 and MSS [Mobile Satellite Services] licensees from interference while maximizing the utility of AWS-3 spectrum for next-generation mobile wireless services."

Metro PCS joined the anti-AWS-3 auction club on Thursday, warning the FCC that the plan would cause "harmful interference" to "a significant portion of its covered population in particular market areas"—areas it said were likely to include Dallas and Detroit.

It's now up to the FCC to decide how much it wants to modify its proposed service based on the concerns of the wireless carriers' engineers, and how much it wants to structure the auction of the band to clear the path for a non-incumbent winner.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.